You have been told you need a business plan, so you opened a twenty-page template, filled in the executive summary, reached the section on market segmentation and closed the tab. That was eight months ago. The document is still in your downloads folder and your business has been running fine without it.
That is because the template was written for someone borrowing money from a bank, and you are not. What you need is one page that answers five questions honestly. It takes about two hours, most of which is arithmetic, and the value is not the page — it is finding out which of the five answers you do not actually have.
The five questions
A plan is a decision-making tool. Its job is to tell you whether the business you are describing adds up, and where it breaks if it does not. Anything on the page that does not help you decide something is decoration.
- Who do you help, and what do you help them do?
- What do you sell, and for how much?
- How many clients do you need, and can you serve that many?
- Where do those clients come from?
- What does it cost to run, and how long can you afford this before it works?
Write each answer in a sentence or two. If an answer needs a paragraph, you have not decided it yet. The two questions coaches skip are four and five, which is why most coaching businesses stall in the same two places.
Question one: who you help, and what you help them do
Not your philosophy. Two facts: who the person is, and what changes for them.
"Women in their thirties returning to lifting after a baby, who want to be strong again without living in a gym" is an answer. "I help people become the best version of themselves" is not — it does not tell you who to talk to, what to write about, or what to put on a sales page.
The reason to be this specific has nothing to do with turning people away. You will still coach whoever walks in during year one. It is that every later question depends on this one. You cannot choose a marketing channel until you know who you are trying to reach, you cannot price against an outcome until you know what the outcome is, and you cannot write content when your subject is everybody.
Two tests for the answer you write down. Could a past client read it and recognise themselves? And does it name a problem the person would say out loud — "I have lost my strength and I do not know where to start again" — rather than one you would use to describe them?
Question two: what you sell, and for how much
An offer is not a price. It is a list of what happens: what the client gets, how often, and for how long they are committing.
Write it as a delivery schedule, because that is what it becomes on Monday morning:
- An intake and a starting program in the first week.
- A program that gets rewritten every four to six weeks.
- A check-in they complete weekly and you respond to within two days.
- Messaging with a stated reply time.
- A minimum commitment of three months, then rolling monthly.
That list is the thing you are pricing, and it is also the thing you will be doing thirty times a week, which is why it belongs in the plan rather than in your head.
The price goes underneath it. Most independent full-service online coaching sits somewhere between $200 and $400 a month, but that range is a sanity check, not a decision — the number comes out of the arithmetic in question three. How to price online coaching packages covers building tiers and setting the floor. For the plan you need one line: the package you want most clients on, and its monthly price.
Question three: how many clients you need, and whether you can serve them
This is the section that decides whether the rest of the page is fiction. It is two calculations and they have to agree.
The first: how many clients the income needs. Take what the year has to produce for you before tax, add what the business costs to run, and divide by your price across twelve months — with an occupancy allowance, because a roster is not full all year.
Say you need $80,000 before tax, your costs run about $5,000 a year, your package is $280 a month and you assume 80% occupancy:
$80,000 + $5,000 = $85,000 revenue needed
$280 × 12 months × 0.8 occupancy = $2,688 per client per year
$85,000 ÷ $2,688 = 32 clients
The second: how many clients you can hold. Not how many logins you can create — how many you can coach at the standard you want to be known for. For full-service online coaching, that is usually somewhere between 30 and 45, and what breaks first is the admin rather than the coaching.
Thirty-two sits inside that range, so this plan holds.
Now run it at $180 a month instead: the same income needs 50 clients, which is above what you can deliver properly, which means the service degrades, which means more of them leave. The plan has just told you your price is wrong, and it told you before you signed anyone. That is the entire reason to do this on paper.
The lever that decides which end of the capacity range you land at is how much of your delivery is bespoke and how much is reusable. Individual programming judgements should stay yours. The repeated structure around them should not be rebuilt per client — a check-in form you wrote once and reuse across the roster is the difference between a weekly check-in taking eight minutes and taking twenty-five. Fitsly's check-in forms are built for that: you build the form and its schedule once and assign it to everyone.
Question four: where those clients come from
Most plans answer this with "social media" and referrals. That is not an answer, it is a category, and it is the reason the plan does not survive contact with January.
An answer names one channel, one action and one frequency. For example:
- Referrals from current and past in-person clients. Ask three specific people a month, directly, for one introduction each.
- One gym or physio partnership. Deliver a free workshop each quarter to their members, with a signup offer attached.
- Instagram, but a defined motion. Three posts a week answering questions your target client actually asks, plus replying to every comment and DM within a day.
- A local challenge or trial group. Run one eight-week paid challenge, then convert the finishers into ongoing coaching.
Pick one to lead with and one to support it. Two channels done properly beat five done occasionally, and the coaches who spread across five are usually avoiding the discomfort of asking somebody directly.
Then do the arithmetic backwards from the roster you need, because that is what turns a channel into a weekly task:
32 clients to hold, losing about 2 a month
= 2 signups a month just to stand still, 4 to grow
Close roughly 1 in 3 discovery calls → 12 calls a month
Book roughly 1 in 4 enquiries → 48 enquiries a month
Forty-eight enquiries a month from three posts a week is not a plausible number, and now you know that in month zero rather than month nine. Either the channel needs to be bigger, the close rate needs work, or you need fewer, better-qualified enquiries. Getting online coaching clients covers what each channel actually costs in time.
Write the whole answer in three lines: the channel, the weekly action, and the enquiries per month it needs to produce. Then track that last number, because it is the only early-warning signal in the business — a bad enquiry month shows up in revenue three months later.
Question five: what it costs, and how long you can afford this
Two costs, and they behave differently.
What the business costs. Coaching software, insurance, certification renewal and CEUs, an accountant, the business share of phone and internet, a website, filming gear, a course a year. For an independent coach with no staff that generally lands between $4,000 and $6,000 a year, and the line-by-line version is here. Card processing sits on top as a percentage of everything you collect rather than a flat bill.
What you cost. Rent, food, loan repayments, everything that leaves your account whether or not a client signs. This is the number missing from every business plan template, and it is the one that ends coaching businesses.
Your plan needs both break-evens, because they are wildly different numbers:
| Monthly | Clients at $280, net of processing | |
|---|---|---|
| Business costs only | $420 | 2 |
| Business costs plus $3,500 of living costs | $3,920 | 15 |
Two clients cover your software and your insurance. Fifteen cover your life. The gap between those rows is your runway question, and it is the last thing to put on the page:
Living costs not covered by other income $3,500 / month
Roster at month three, 6 clients $1,650 net
Monthly shortfall $1,850
Savings or other income available $11,000
Runway about 6 months at that roster
Six months is the honest answer to "how long can I afford to do this". It is not a discouraging number — it is a decision-making one. It tells you whether to go full-time now or keep gym floor hours until you cross fifteen clients, and it tells you when to stop and reassess rather than grinding on. Coaches who never do this calculation do not run out of belief. They run out of money and call it something else.
For the numbers past that point — what your income actually looks like once processing, costs and tax come off revenue — the arithmetic is here.
One thing this page will not do is tell you which business structure to trade under, what to register, what insurance you must hold or how tax applies to any of it. Those vary by country, by state and by how much you earn, they change as the business grows, and they are worth one proper conversation with an accountant rather than an afternoon of guessing.
The whole plan on one page
Filled in with the worked example above, the finished thing looks like this. It fits on a page because it is meant to be read again, not filed.
| Your answer | |
|---|---|
| Who I help | Women returning to lifting after a baby who want strength back without living in the gym |
| What I sell | Individual programming, weekly check-in, nutrition targets, messaging with a two-day reply — $280/month, three-month minimum |
| Clients I need | 32 at 80% occupancy, against a capacity of about 35 |
| Where they come from | Referrals from past in-person clients, supported by three Instagram posts a week — needs about 48 enquiries a month |
| What it costs | $5,000 a year fixed plus processing; break-even at 2 clients, personal break-even at 15 |
| Runway | About 6 months at the current roster |
Six rows. Everything else in a conventional business plan — the market analysis, the competitor matrix, the five-year projection — exists to convince someone else. Nobody is reading this but you.
Revisit it every quarter, not every five years
A plan is not finished, it is current. Put an hour in the calendar every three months and check the six rows against what actually happened.
The value is in the disagreements. Your capacity said 35 and you are drowning at 24 — the offer has more of your time in it than you costed. Your channel needed 48 enquiries and produced 11 — either the channel is wrong or the action is not happening. You are at capacity with a waiting list — the price is under the value and the plan says raise it. Every one of those is a decision you can make in an hour because the number is written down and you can see it move.
The other reason to revisit is that question one drifts. Two years in, most coaches find the clients they actually enjoy and get results with are a narrower group than the one they started aiming at. That is worth writing into the plan rather than leaving as a feeling, because everything downstream of it changes when it does.
